Baduk can sometimes teach us a thing or two about life if we think about it properly. Of course, if you ask a golfer, she will also tell you that golf equals life. This could even be true if you ask anyone who is a major fan of anything, say anime or playing checkers or listening to Bach etc., and they will tell you that the object of their passion equals life itself and all the wisdom of the universe can be found in that obscure object. Let me then do my part to promote Baduk a little bit.

How often do you find yourself saying lines similar this (or having someone say this to your face): “Ah, I should have done it this way. It would have saved me so much time and money!”. Of course, all the wisdom in the world can be found in hindsight, or put in another way, what the Chinese often refer to as “Horse behind the Canon”. One of the key idea in process re-engineering is to layout all the steps in the process and identify which steps are worthless and do not add value. By eliminating these steps, the process becomes more efficient.

This concept is nothing new in Baduk. When evaluating moves, strong Baduk players often perform “tewari” analysis. Tewari analysis can be defined as “Breaking down a position by eliminating an equal number of stones in order to analyze the efficiency of the moves”. By doing this, players get to analyse on how to make better and more efficient moves, why some variations are better than the others etc.

This can be applied to any daily chores that you do. Try to think of something that you do, step by step, and map it out on a piece of paper. Then systematically look at each step, backward, forward, and think of the steps that can be eliminated and the steps that can be combined and after eliminating and/or combining them, you still achieve the same objective of that chore. It is like how John Travolta suddenly clicked in the movie “Phenomenon”. Suddenly, he seemed to be an expert in tewari analysis and found better ways of doing things. In real life, by simply putting some thoughts in how we do things, we become significantly more efficient, more lean, more productive.

Ok, here’s an example from the Baduk tewari analysis. Remember that in my earlier entry (featuring the diagram above), I have posted on a variation of the Hoshi joseki? In one of the variations, it was mentioned that a certain variation played by Ma Xiaochun against Lee Changho was deemed to be not really good based on a tewari analysis. I did not include that tewari analysis performed by Cho Hunhyun in the file earlier and am making it good in this post. If you are interested in this tewari analysis, you can download the .sgf file here: http://rapidshare.de/files/16880519/tewari.sgf.html.

Hope that you will like it. This is a transcript of the same lesson presented by Wang Yuan 8p.